In United States, these are privately run schools but publicly funded (mainly through property taxes) like regular public schools. Those on the political right love charter schools because they blame the ills of the inner-city public school system (which, because of de facto residential segregation, serves mainly racial minorities) on, supposedly, a bloated educational bureaucracy; inadequately motivated schoolchildren; and poorly trained and/or lazy teachers who cannot be fired from their positions because of the power of the teachers’ unions. Charter schools are supposed to be the panacea; taking care of these kinds of problems. As is so often the case with the positions of the right on socio-economic issues, evidence does not bear them out—for the most part. This makes sense, because the problems of these schools are not rooted primarily in factors to do with agency (bad kids, bad teachers, and bad administrators) but rather factors of structure: most important among them being, not surprisingly, underfunding.[1]
[1]. One of the best works that exposes the structural problems of the inner-city public school system is that by Jonathan Kozol (the title of his book says it all: The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America [New York, Three Rivers, 2005]). See also the book by Peter Sacks: Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). As for an evaluation of the performance of charter schools see, for example, the June 2009 report by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (titled Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States) which concludes that while the picture is a little mixed, the basic pattern nevertheless is clear:
Charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers across the country, with every expectation that they will continue to figure prominently in national educational strategy in the months and years to come. And yet, this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS [traditional public schools] counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face.